Terry Carson
Department of Secondary Education,
University of Alberta
In his famous book Democracy and Education published in 1916, John Dewey outlined what he saw to be the essential role of the public school in developing a democratic society. Dewey's point was that the public school did not exist so much to serve the public, but that it was actually creating a public with common values, understandings and skills that would support and sustain democratic community. In this sense, the public school and democratic community were inseparable.
The public space in Canada and the United States is now very different from the community envisioned by Dewey in the first half of the 20th Century. (Dewey died at the age of 94 in 1952.) As Maxine Greene reminds us, Dewey and his contemporaries spared little thought for "gender difference or cultural diversity or even class divisions as factors relevant to education and public life." (Greene, 1996, 33). Greene argues that the community is now marked by a deep diversity and a struggle for voice among those previously marginalized in a Eurocentric and patriarchal dispensation.
Many would argue that the public space is now more like a collection of privatized lives. Privatization has been made possible by a proliferation of home entertainment systems, of personal computers, and by an over-arching culture of individualism. By contrast, a vision of the public space in Dewey's time is vividly described in E.L. Doctorow's rendering of 1906 America in his novel Ragtime:
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Teddy Roosevelt was President. The population customarily gathered in great numbers either out of doors for parades, public concerts, fish fries, political picnics, social outings, or indoors in public meeting halls, vaudeville theatres, operas, ballrooms. There seemed to be no entertainment that did not involve great swarms of people. Trains and streamers and trolleys moved with them from one place to another. That was the style, that was the way people lived. (Doctorow, 1975, 3-4) |
Old photographs of Jasper Avenue in Edmonton or Centre Street in Calgary suggest that there was a similar character to western Canadian in the first half of the 20th century. These pictures also show great gatherings of people at public events in such numbers that we can scarcely believe when we recall that, at the time, Edmonton and Calgary were cities of fewer than 100,000 people each.
Today, there are real concerns over the health of democracy in Canada and the United States. There is deep cynicism and increasing frustration with the failure of representative democracy to provide an adequate forum for citizen participation. In a recent Globe and Mail column Michael Valpy quotes Progressive Conservative Senator Lowell Murray observation that Canadian political institutions have "sunk to near-irrelevance [in which] the House of Commons is programmed to the convenience of the executive. Over a period of 30 years, it has become a shell in terms of holding the government accountable." (Valpy, 2000, A9) Frustration with the failure to be heard and to participate meaningfully in the political process is now boiling over into the streets -- as we have been witnessing over the past few months at the WTO meetings in Washington and Seattle, at the anti-poverty demonstrations at Queens Park in Toronto, in the protests over the Bill 11 health care legislation that took place front of the provincial legislature in Edmonton.
How are we, as educators, to create a democratic public in the public schools of Canada and the United States? Have we lost faith in the grand purpose envisioned for the public school by Dewey in Democracy and Education? Is his vision of the social purpose of the public school no longer relevant in a society that has become so pluralistic and so diverse?
As teacher educators, we believe that the public school continues to have a purpose in the creation of a democratic public that is so necessary to sustain a strong democratic community. In declaring this purpose we also note how easily we can become distracted from this purpose by the very way that secondary education fragments all education, including civic education into separate subject area disciplines, and that knowledge and meaningful action are divorced from one another. In the present arrangement citizenship becomes ghettoized in the social studies, which is in itself an increasingly marginalized subject in a curriculum that is heavy with the maths, sciences and technology.
The articles of this special issue represent an attempt to do something about this fragmentation. Taken together, they suggest how teachers might begin to overcome fragmentation and act together in creating citizens for a democratic society.
References
Dewey, J., 1916/1966. Education and Democracy. New York: Free Press.
Doctorow, E. 1975. Ragtime. New York: Random House.
Greene, M. 1996. "Plurality, diversity, and the public space." In Can Democracy be Taught? ed. A. Oldenquist, Bloomington: Phi Delta Kappa Educational Foundation.
Valpy, M. "Is the war of words over?" Toronto Globe and Mail, June 17, 2000.